Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

words varak, which means both leaves (of trees) and pages
(leaves) of books, and rūzgār, which means both “wind”
and “fate.” Whether or not this works to convey suffi ciently
the tenor of Bākīʼs poem to readers who might have needed
Gibbʼs footnotes is impossible for me to tell.
Bākīʼs poem makes a good text for commenting on
one of the problems I mentioned above: that we (sadly)
lack information about the contexts of most poems in the
Ottoman tradition. There are things we know about Bākī
that fi t this poem. He came from a humble background
and rose to prominence by virtue of a brilliant mind and
formidable poetic talent. As a young man, during the glory
years of the reign of Sultan Süleyman (the Magnifi cent
to Europeans, the Lawgiver to the Ottomans), he rose to
the pinnacle of success: professor of canon law, Chief
Magistrate of the European provinces, companion of
the Sultan, and critic of the royal verses, recognized as
the Sultan of Poets. But in later years, under three more
sultans, his hopes were often dashed, and his place at
court was diminished and fi nally lost. This poem is the
kind of poem in which an Ottoman poet might well have
recounted, in metaphors of the garden, the miseries and
disappointments of his later years to a gathering of friends
and admiring young would-be poets. The poem fi ts his
life so comfortably, but it still comes to us abstracted from
its context, in a collection of poems (what the Ottomans
called a divan). For all we really know and probably will
ever know for sure, he could have written it when he was
eighteen. But sure or not, it is instructive to speculate,
especially where we can feel a connection.
Having once abandoned the “two-hemistich” look of
the original poems, it became possible for me to think about
creative ways to give a sense of the original rhythm. Of
course we have no certain knowledge of how a 16th-century
Ottoman poem might have been recited. Nonetheless, one
of the rhythmical features of this poetry that always struck
me was the way that the steady alternations of long- and
short-syllable patterns were overlaid by patterns of “minicaesurae,”
or tiny pauses caused by phrasing or syntactical
inversions in the Turkish. We can see how this works by
looking at the fi rst couplet of Bākīʼs autumn poem. As
transcribed from the Arabic script, it looks like this:
Nām u nişāne kalmadı fasl-ı bahārdan
Düşdi çemende berg-i diraht iʻtibārdan
If the same sentences were rendered in uninverted or
canonical (subject-objects-verb) Turkish syntax, they might
look like this:
nām u nişāne fasl-ı bahārdan kalmadı
berg-i diraht çemende iʻtibārdan düşdi
The inversions of this syntax cause the reading to imply the
following tiny breaks:
Nām u nişāne kalmadı // fasl-ı bahārdan
Düşdi çemende // berg-i diraht // iʻtibārdan
In the second couplet, the fi rst hemistich is in canonical
Turkish order, and the syntactic breaks seem to fall on the
boundaries between subject, objects, and verb, whereas
in the second hemistich, the inversions return. We might
distribute the breaks as follows:
Eşcār-ı bāg // hırka-i tecrīde [//?] girdiler
Bād-ı hazān // çemende el aldı // çenārdan
Even though popular (non-elite), “syllable-counting”
Turkish verse depends on similar patterns of phrases but
with groups of syllables regularly separated by caesurae
(e.g., a 4 + 4 + 3–syllable line), this sense of a supraformal
rhythm in Ottoman elite poetry had always seemed that it
might be no more than my own idiosyncratic impression. Yet
as I grew older and less concerned about potential criticism,
I began to take some tentative steps toward controlling the
rhythm of my translations while, at the same time, freeing
the English poem from the regularity of the standard couplet.
The following translation is of a gazel (a short, more or
less sonnet-length love lyric) by Sultan Cem (pronounced
“Djem”), the brother of Sultan Bayezid II (reigned 1481–
1512). Cem escaped certain death at his brotherʼs accession.
He fl ed to Rhodes, was held hostage in Europe by the
Templars and the Pope, and, according to popular tales,
had a torrid love affair with a French chatelaine during his
captivity. These connections to European Christian allies
and lovers seem to be intimated by the striking examples
of Christian imagery in Cemʼs poem. The translation itself
exhibits a transition between the quatrain-like rendition of
the Bākī gazel and something even freer:
The rose-stem arouses no passion
Like your bodyʼs slender grace
Blooms no rose in bowers of paradise
Like the rose of your face
The ring of your curl
Took your lipʼs tiny mole
Into its embrace
As though an infant Jesus
Lay in Maryʼs arms
The image of your lip, your eyes
Have ruined my eye
That drunk and senseless lies
Wine in its goblet dancing
Translation Review 27